Monday, March 31, 2014

There was a series of similarities between the figures of Ahiqar and Aesop, probably originating in a common repository of narrative motifs and gnomicmaterial widespread in the Eastern Mediterranean. These analogies facilitated comparison and rapprochement of the two heroes, as soon as Ahiqar’s story became known to the Greek world in early Hellenistic times. Both Ahiqar and Aesop were narrators of fables, using them for admonitory as well as censorious purposes. Ahiqar addressed such parables to his adoptive son, in order to teach him wisdom and correct behaviour (thus in the version of Elephantine) or to reprove him for his perfidy (thus in later versions). Correspondingly, Aesop employed his fables as a vehicle of political advice to the Samians or of blame against the Delphians and their insidious accusations. Further, both Ahiqar and Aesop appeared in the role of the innocent man falling victim to a treacherous scheme, unjustly persecuted and condemned on false charges. Thus, both underwent a kind of “death and resurrection” experience: Ahiqar was hidden in an underground crypt, much like a grave, until he was rehabilitated and returned to light again. Aesop was put to death, but his soul came back to life. In both cases, justice was restored in the end, and the people responsible for the hero’s persecution (respectively Nadin and the Delphians) were punished.

based on the New Testament
teaching that “salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22)- and that God’s
salvation is wholly civilising - returned to the Patristic view that the Greeks
(and Romans) were, in turn, philosophically influenced by the Hebrews – at
least to some degree. Thus I, in my:

noted
that: “… the Fathers of the Church appreciated at least the seminal impact that
the Hebrews had had upon Greco-Roman thinking”.

However, I then took this
basic conception a large step further, “though without [the Fathers] having
taken the extra step that I intend to take in this article, of actually recognising the most famous
early western (supposedly) philosophers as being originally Hebrew”.

This
was an attempt to begin a re-writing of the history of ancient philosophy.

The
most seminal supposedly ‘Greek’ (non mainland) philosophers, Thales and Pythagoras, I had concluded in this article, were basically
a muddled western version of the great Hebrew patriarch, Joseph of Egypt,
historically Egypt’s Old Kingdom Imhotep and Ptahhotep. Thus it was with great
interest that I recently read Dr. Ed (Ewald) Metzler’s discussion of Pythagoras
in his:

I have often quoted from Dr.
Metzler’s ground-breaking article, “Conflict of
Laws in the Israelite Dynasty of Egypt” (http://moziani.tripod.com/dynasty/ammm_2_1.htm) which is, in my opinion, one of a relatively few (considering the
amount of versions that are currently being poured out) genuinely useful
modifications of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky’s revised ancient history in relation
to the Bible. Velikovsky’s important pioneering work did stand in need of
modification. But not that many, as I see it, have managed to do something
effective to develop it. Metzler’s “Conflict of Laws” is a fine exception.

Now, his article on western philosophy has also some
most valuable insights, I believe. Though, in this regard, Dr. Metzler would be
closer to Patristic thought than to mine, considering that he would maintain
the standard view that the likes of Thales and Pythagoras were what the history
books say they were, and not Hebrews. What is important about this article is
the decided Hebrew influence upon Pythagoras. Apparently he was saturated in
it. Not surprising, according to my view, that he was indeed a Hebrew.

Dr.
Metzler’s Thesis

Though he begins with the textbook view of Thales,
and Pythagoras, there is this twist to it:

§ 1. The history of
western philosophy begins
in ancient Greece with men like Thales of Miletus
and Pythagoras. Yet, their dependence on Jewish
thought as well as the cultural impact of Israel
on Greece during its formative period generally,
remained shrouded in mystery as long as no exact
information was available about the central cult object in the Holy of Holies
of the First Temple,
built by King Solomon in Jerusalem as depository
for the Ark of the Covenant with the two stone
Tablets of the Law of the Torah of Moses from
the Sinai. As a legal scientist I discovered in 1983
all I ever wanted to know about the Mosaical
Tablets of the Law, thus shedding new light on
the impact of Israel on western philosophy, as
I already mentioned in my last book entitled
“DISCOVERING MOSAISTICS, Introduction to
the Scientific Study of the Law of Moses and
Mosaical Antiquity.”1)

This leads Dr. Metzler to this
interesting quest so compatible with my own: “Under these circumstances, it
appears legitimate for a lawyer to inquire into the origins of western
philosophy”. I have done likewise in “Re-Orienting to Zion”. But, in Metzler’s case, the Mosaïc
Law is of the essence of his inquiry:

My discoveries in
the field of legal history led to the complete recon-
struction of the Mosaical Tablets of the Law,
including the graphical details of their inscription,
and the original alphabet, in which it was written,
their geometry, and their exact weights and
measures.3) This important source of ancient law,
which I once called the Magna Charta of antiquity,
exerted an influence on western culture that went
far beyond the proper sphere of law.4)

The very holiness of the Mosaïc Law was what
inspired the philosophy of Israel and also of the rest, hence it was
fundamentally mystical:

Being deposited in
the Holy of Holies of the Solomonic
temple in Jerusalem, the Mosaical Tablets of the
Law were transformed from a legal document
into an object of religious worship, and it was in this mystified form that
they were to inspire
the philosophy of future generations, both inIsrael and abroad.5)

Included amongst those influenced was
the great Pythagoras himself:

A.The Mosaical
Tablets of the Law
as the Jewish Blueprints of
Pythagorean Philosophy

§ 3. According to Hermippus
of SmyrnaPythagoras owed all of his theories to the Jews.6)
Best known are the Pythagorean theorem and the Pythagorean numbers 3, 4, and 5,
forming
a right triangle.

For Dr. Metzler,
accepting the conventional view here, Thales and Pythagoras were amongst the
influenced, rather than being amongst the originators: “But absolutely nothing
was known
about Jewish mathematics at the time of the
destruction of the First Temple (586 B. C. E.),
– when Thales lived and Pythagoras was born …”.

Then Dr. Metzler
believed himself to have found the key, he being the one who:

…. discovered the
three-dimensional structure
of the Ten Commandments.7) As a legal scientist,
convinced that Jewish legal and scribal tradition
would not change one jot or tittle of the law of
the Torah of Moses from the Sinai, I found the
distribution of the letters on the original stone
inscription.8) They were entered into squares like
those of a crossword puzzle, which disclosed the
proportions of the Tablets of the Law containing
the Pythagorean numbers, as did their box, the
Ark of the Covenant.9)

Dr. Metzler has to struggle with a certain weirdness in the conventional
Pythagoras that is the result of not knowing who was the prototypal philosopher
from whichthis Greek hybrid emerged:
namely the genius Joseph (Imhotep): “§ 4. Of course, Pythagoras might have gotten his theorem
somewhere else, if it were not for his
other teachings, which make him look like a man
of weird idiosyncrasies.10) But the Hebrew element is, as he sees
it - and I think rightly -what holds it
all together:

However, the bond
which ties his various theories together is the
fact that they all refer to the Tablets of the Law
in the Holy of Holies of the First Temple in
Jerusalem, such as the holiness of the ten spheres
(Decalogue), the Tetraktys (Tetragrammaton), and
the so-called Pythagorean numbers 3, 4, and 5 of the tablets and their box.11)
The Pythagoreans
swore their holy oath by the Tetraktys, i. e. by the
Tetragrammaton Y.H.W.H. or YaHUH (Yahuweh),
“by him who has given to our people the Ten
Commandments”, the ten boustrophedon lines
(Devarim “logoi” or Sephirot “spheres”) of theTorah “theoria” of Moses, – as the Jews even
today bless “him who has given the Torah to
his people Israel.”12)

So much so, that Metzler must conclude: “§ 5. Obviously, Pythagoras was a convert
to Judaism …”. However, his attempt to sort out the difficult name, Pythagoras”, is far
from being linguistically convincingly: “Pytha-” standing for Israel in the land of Canaan
or “Put” (= Phoenicia), and “-goras” for “Giyora”
meaning a Ger or proselyte.13) Preferable for me is an Egyptian
origin for his name, with Pyth being a Greek version of Ptah, based upon the
ancient sage, Ptahhotep.

And I would adjust Dr. Metzler’s view that: “[Pythagoras] taught in Greek what he had learned
in Hebrew about a kosher
life-style, reminiscent of the vegetarianism of his
biblical contemporary Daniel in Babylon, about
the geometry of the Mosaical Tablets of the Law …” – {especially
considering that I do not believe he was anywhere near being a contemporary of
Daniel’s, whose career was similar to Joseph’s} - to his having been raised as
a Hebrew, and who probably taught much in Egyptian during his long sojourn in
that country.

The great Pythagoras is sometimes referred to as a “mathemagician”. He
was based upon a man of great genius, but a non Greek, Joseph/Imhotep – the
latter sometimes referred to, in turn, as the Leonardo Da Vinci of the ancient
world. As I wrote in “Re-Orienting to Zion”, regarding this Imhotep:

PYTHAGORAS, based on traditions of the great antiquity of his
doctrines; the possibility that he may even have hailed from Syria (Tyre) and
was hence a barbarian (that is, a non-Greek); his being circumcised; his
concerns with dietary laws; his abstention from illicit sex; and the very
Egyptian looking first syllable in his name, Pyth (= Ptah?); was probably once
again the great Ptah-hotep, or Imhotep, of Egypt, who I am saying was the
biblical Joseph. We have already considered the lack of sure knowledge about [Pythagoras].
Here is another sample (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/):

Pythagoras … spent his early years on the island
of Samos, off the coast of modern Turkey. At the age of forty, however, he emigrated to the
city of Croton in southern Italy and most of his philosophical activity
occurred there. Pythagoras wrote nothing, nor were there any detailed accounts
of his thought written by contemporaries. By the first centuries [BC],
moreover, it became fashionable to present Pythagoras in a largely unhistorical
fashion as a semi-divine figure, who originated all that was true in the Greek
philosophical tradition, including many of Plato's and Aristotle's mature
ideas. A number of treatises were forged in the name of Pythagoras and other
Pythagoreans in order to support this view. Likewise, did the genius Imhotep
(Joseph)
become a semi-divine figure.

Imhotep was an ancient Egyptian genius who
achieved great success in a wide variety of fields. Inventor of the pyramid,
author of ancient wisdom, architect, high priest, physician, astronomer,
and writer, Imhotep's many talents and vast acquired knowledge had such an
effect on the Egyptian people that he became one of only a handful
of individuals of nonroyal birth to be deified, or promoted to the status
of a god.

The great
Lawgiver in the Bible, and hence in Hebrew history, was Moses, substantially
the author of the 'Torah' (Law). But the history books tell us that the 'Torah'
was probably dependent upon the law code issued by the Babylonian king,
Hammurabi (dated to the first half of the C18th BC). I shall discuss this
further on. For Egyptian identifications of Moses, see our:

The
Egyptians may have corrupted the legend of the baby Moses in the bulrushes so
that now it became the goddess Isis who drew the baby Horus from the Nile and
had him suckled by Hathor (the goddess in the form of a cow - the Egyptian
personification of wisdom). In the original story, of course, baby Moses was
drawn from the water by an Egyptian princess, not a goddess, and was weaned by
Moses' own mother (Exodus 2:5-9).

Anyway, Moses became for the Egyptians Hor-mes,
meaning 'son of Hathor', which legendary person the Greeks eventually
absorbed into their own pantheon as Hermes, the winged messenger god. [The Roman version of Hermes is Mercury].

But could
both the account of the rescue of the baby Moses in the Book of Exodus, and the
Egyptian version of it, be actually based upon a Mesopotamian original, as the
textbooks say; based upon the story of king Sargon of Akkad in Mesopotamia?
Sargon tells, "in terms reminiscent of Moses, Krishna and other great
men", that [as quoted by G. Roux, Ancient
Iraq, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 152]:

.… My
changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket
of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid. She cast me into the river which
rose not over me. The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of
water. Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me ….

Given
that Sargon is conventionally dated to the C24th BC, and Moses about a
millennium later, it would seem inevitable that the Hebrew version, and the
Egyptian one, must be imitations of the Mesopotamian one. Such is what the
‘history’ books say, at least, despite the fact that the extant Sargon legend
is very late (C7th BC); though thought to have been based upon an earlier
Mesopotamian original.

But when the revision of history is applied to this
scenario, Sargon of Akkad is found to have lived somewhat later than Moses. D.
Hickman ["The Dating of Hammurabi", Proceedings
of the Third Seminar of Catastrophism and Ancient History (Uni. of Toronto,
1985, ed. M. Luckerman, pp. 13-28] has, for example, revised Sargon down
to at least the 1300's BC, shortly after the death of Moses' successor Joshua.

We would
accept Hickman’s revised dater as a rough estimation - {we suspect that Sargon
should be dated even later than this} - and hence would argue that the
Mesopotamians later picked up the story of Moses's infancy from the Israelites
who were to become their subjects in captivity. By no means was the Exodus
account of Moses dependent upon the legend of Sargon.

Far more accurately
and convincingly we think has Dean Hickman re-dated Hammurabi to the time of
Solomon (mid-C10th BC), re-identifying Hammurabi's older contemporary,
Shamsi-Adad I, as king David's Syrian foe, Hadadazer (2 Samuel 10:16). We have
taken all this much further since, by identifying Hammurabi as King Solomon
himself as ruler also of Babylon, in the apostate phase of Solomon’s reign.

"Moses
grows up at the court of the Egyptian king as a member of the royal family, and
subsequently flees from Egypt after having slain an Egyptian - as Danaos, a
member of the Egyptian ruling house, flees from the same country after the
slaying of the Aigyptiads which he had arranged. The same number of generations
separates Moses from Leah the "wild cow" and Danaos from the cow
Io."

Comment: The above parallel might even account for how the
Greeks managed to confuse the land of Ionia (Io) with the land of Israel
in the case of the earliest philosophers (refer back to the Philosophy
section). Astour continues [ibid., pp. 99-100]:

"Still
more characteristic is that both Moses and Danaos find and create springs in a
waterless region; the story of how Poseidon, on the request of the Danaide
Amymona, struck out with his trident springs from the Lerna rock, particularly
resembles Moses producing a spring from the rock by the stroke of his
staff."

A `cow'
features also in the legend of Cadmus, son of Agenor, king of Tyre upon the
disappearance of his sister Europa, who was sent by his father together with
his brothers Cilix and Phoenix to seek her with instructions not to return
without her. Seeking the advice of the oracle at Delphi, Cadmus was told to
settle at the point where a cow, which he would meet leaving the temple, would
lie down. The cow led him to the site of Thebes (remember the two cities by
that name). There he built the citadel of Cadmeia. Cadmus married Harmonia, the
daughter of Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite and, according to the legend, was
the founder of the House of Oedipus]

Astour believes that "even more similar
features" may be discovered if one links these accounts to the
Ugaritic (Phoenicio-Canaanite) poem of Danel, which he had previously
identified as "the prototype of the Danaos myth" [ibid., p.
100]:

The name
of Aqht, the son of Danel, returns as Qehat, the grandfather of
Moses. The name of the locality Mrrt, where Aqht was killed,
figures in the gentilic form Merarî as the brother of Qehat in
the Levite genealogy. The name of P?t, the daughter of Danel and the
devoted sister of Aqht, is met in the Moses story as Pû'ã, a
midwife who saved the life of the new-born Moses. The very name of Moses, in
the feminine form Mšt, is, in the Ugaritic poem, the first half of
Danel's wife's name, while the second half of her name, Dnty,
corresponds to the name of Levi's sister Dinah.

Astour
had already explained how the biblical story of the Rape of Dinah (Genesis 34)
was "analogous to the myth of the bloody wedding of her namesakes, the
Danaides".

He
continues on here with his fascinating Greco-Israelite parallels:

Dân, the root of the names Dnel,
Dnty (and also Dinah and Danaos), was the name of a tribe whose priests
claimed to descend directly from Moses (Jud. 18:30); and compare the serpent
emblem of the tribe of Dan with the serpent staff of Moses and the bronze
serpent he erected. …Under the same name - Danaë - another Argive heroine of the
Danaid stock is thrown into the sea in a chest with her new-born son - as Moses
in his ark (tébã) - and lands on the serpent-island of Seriphos (Heb. šãrâph,
applied i.a. to the bronze serpent made by Moses). Moses, like Danel, is a
healer, a prophet, a miracle-worker - cf. Danel's staff (mt) which he
extends while pronouncing curses against towns and localities, quite like Moses
in Egypt; and especially, like Danel, he is a judge….

(b) Roman 'Moses-like Myth'

The
Romans further corrupted the story of the infant Moses, following on probably
from the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Phoenicians and Greeks. I refer to the
account of Romulus (originally Rhomus) and Remus, thought to have founded the
city of Rome in 753 BC. Both the founders and the date are quite mythical. The
Romans apparently took the Egyptian name for Moses, Musare, and turned
it into Rhomus and Remus (MUSA-RE = RE-MUS), with the formerly one child
(Moses) now being doubled into two babies (twins). According to this legend,
the twins were put into a basket by some kind servants and floated in the Tiber
River, from which they were eventually rescued by a she-wolf. Thus the Romans
more pragmatically opted for a she-wolf as the suckler instead of a cow
goddess, or a lion goddess, Sekhmet (the fierce alter ego of Hathor).

The
Romans took yet another slice from the Pentateuch when they had the founder of
the city of Rome, Romulus, involved in a fratricide (killing Remus); just as
Cain, the founder of the world's first city, had killed his own brother, Abel
(cf. Genesis 4:8 and 4:17).

More
significant Roman borrowings from the Bible (in this case the New Testament)
will be discussed later in the Revelation section.

An
Islamic lecturer, Ahmed Deedat ["What the Bible
Says About Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) the Prophet of Islam" (www.islamworld.net/Muhammad.in.Bible.html)], told of an interview he once
had with a dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church in Transvaal, van Heerden, on
the question: "What does the Bible say about Muhummed?" Deedat
had in mind the Holy Qur'an verse 46:10, according to which "a witness
among the children of Israel bore witness of one like him…". This was
in turn a reference to Deuteronomy 18:18's "I will raise them up a Prophet
from among their brethren, like unto thee, and I will put my words in his
mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him." The
Moslems of course interpret the "one like him [i.e. Moses]" as
being Mohammed himself.

Faced
with the dominee's emphatic response that the Bible has "nothing"
to say about Mohammed - and that the Deuteronomic prophecy ultimately pertained
to Jesus Christ, as did "thousands" of other prophecies -
Deedat set out to prove him wrong. We have taken up this argument in more
detail in our:

in which
we have now identified the prophet Mohammed with a composite biblical character
- but essentially with Nehemiah, from whose
name arose the Arabic version of the name, Muhammad. Thus we have concluded
that the original Mohammed did figure
in the Bible, but as a great Israelite Prophet. Certainly, in that sense, he
was Moses-like (as Islam holds), as all of the great prophets of Israel would
have followed, and emulated, Moses.

Whilst
Mohammed, actually an Israelite, as we have argued, came much later than Moses,
there nevertheless do seem to be Arabic borrowings of the Moses story itself
(and even appropriations of certain very specific aspects of the life of Jesus,
as we shall read later) in the legends about Mohammed, who especially resembles
Moses in

Mohammed as a Lawgiver is a direct pinch I believe
from the Hebrew Pentateuch and from the era of Jeremiah. Consider the following
[O'Hair, M., "Mohammed", A text of American
Atheist Radio Series program No. 65, first broadcast on August 25, 1969. (www.atheists.org/Islam.Mohammed.html)]:

"Now
the Kaaba or Holy Stone at Mecca was the scene of an annual pilgrimage, and
during this pilgrimage in 621 Mohammed was able to get six persons from Medina
to bind themselves to him. They did so by taking the following oath.

Not
consider anyone equal to Allah;

Not to
steal;

Not to be
unchaste;

Not to
kill their children;

Not
willfully to calumniate".

This is
simply the Mosaïc Decalogue, with the following Islamic addition [ibid.]:

"To
obey the prophet's orders in equitable matters.

In return
Mohammed assured these six novitiates of paradise. The place where these first
vows were taken is now called the first Akaba".

"The
mission of Mohammed", perfectly reminiscent of that of Moses, and later of Nehemiah (who is
the proper matrix for Mohammed), was "to restore the worship of the One
True God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, as taught by Prophet
Ibrahim [Abraham] and all Prophets of God, and complete the laws of moral,
ethical, legal, and social conduct and all other matters of significance for
the humanity at large." [ibid.]

The
above-mentioned Burning Bush incident occurred whilst Moses

(a)was living in exile (Exodus 2:15)

(b)amongst the Midianite tribe of
Jethro, in the Paran desert.

(c)Moses had married Jethro's
daughter, Zipporah (v. 21).

Likewise
Mohammed (also partly applicable to Jeremiah, to Nehemiah)

(a)experienced exile;

(b)to Medina, a name which may easily
have become confused with the similar sounding, Midian, and

(c)he had only the one wife at the
time, Khadija. Also

(d)Moses, like Mohammed, was
terrified by what God had commanded of him, protesting that he was "slow
of speech and slow of tongue" (Exodus 4:10). To which God replied:
"Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or
blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be your mouth and teach you
what you are to speak' (vv. 11-12).

Now this
episode, seemingly coupled with Moses’s (with Jeremiah’s) call, has come
distorted into the Koran as Mohammed's being terrified by what God was asking
of him, protesting that he was not learned. To which God supposedly replied
that he had 'created man from a clot of congealed blood, and had taught man the
use of the pen, and that which he knew not, and that man does not speak ought
of his own desire but by inspiration sent down to him'.

Ironically, whilst Moses the writer complained
about his lack of verbal eloquence, Mohammed, 'unlettered and unlearned', who
therefore could not write, is supposed to have been told that God taught man to
use the pen (?). But Mohammed apparently never learned to write, because
he is supposed only to have spoken God's utterances. Though his words, like
those of Moses (who however did write, e.g. Exodus 34:27), were written down in
various formats by his secretary, Zaid (roughly equating to the biblical
Joshua, a writer, Joshua 8:32, or to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch).

This is
generally how the Koran is said to have arisen.

But
Mohammed also resembles Moses in his childhood (and Tobit also) in the fact
that, after his infancy, he was raised by a foster-parent (Exodus 2:10). And
there is the inevitable weaning legend [Zahoor, A. and
Haq, Z., "Biography of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)", (http://cyberistan.org/islamic/muhammad.html), 1998.]: "All biographers state
that the infant prophet sucked only one breast of his foster-mother, leaving
the other for the sustenance of his foster-brother".

There is even a kind of Islamic version of the
Exodus. Compare
the following account of the Qoreish persecution and subsequent pursuit of the
fleeing Moslems with the persecution and later pursuit of the fleeing
Israelites by Pharaoh (Exodus 1 and 4:5-7) [O’Hair, op. cit., ibid.]:

When the persecution became unbearable for
most Muslims, the Prophet advised them in the fifth year of his mission (615
CE) to emigrate to Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) where Ashabah (Negus, a
Christian) was the ruler. Eighty people, not counting the small children,
emigrated in small groups to avoid detection. No sooner had they left the
Arabian coastline
[substitute Egyptian borders], the
leaders of Quraish discovered their flight. They decided to not leave these
Muslims in peace, and immediately sent two of their envoys to Negus to bring
all of them back.

The Koran
of Islam is basically just the Arabic version of the Hebrew Bible with all its
same famous patriarchs and leading characters. That is apparent from what the
Moslems themselves admit. For example [ibid.]:

The Qur'an also mentions four previously revealed
Scriptures: Suhoof (Pages) of Ibrahim (Abraham), Taurat ('Torah') as
revealed to Prophet Moses, Zuboor ('Psalms') as revealed to Prophet David, and
Injeel ('Evangel') as revealed to Prophet Jesus (pbuh). Islam requires belief
in all prophets and revealed scriptures (original, non-corrupted) as part of
the Articles of Faith.

Mohammed
is now for Islam the last and greatest of the prophets. Thus, "in the
Al-Israa, Gabriel (as) took the Prophet from the sacred Mosque near Ka'bah to
the furthest (al-Aqsa) mosque in Jerusalem in a very short time in the latter
part of a night. Here, Prophet Muhammad met with previous Prophets (Abraham,
Moses, Jesus and others) and he led them in prayer" [ibid.].

Thus
Mohammed supposedly led Jesus in prayer.

The
reputation of Ibn Ishaq (ca 704-767), a main authority on the life and times of
the Prophet varied considerably among the early Moslem critics: some found him
very sound, while others regarded him as a liar in relation to Hadith
(Mohammed's sayings and deeds). His Sira is not extant in its original
form, but is present in two recensions done in 833 and 814-15, and these texts
vary from one another. Fourteen others have recorded his lectures, but their
versions differ [ibid.]:

It was the storytellers who created the tradition:
the sound historical traditions to which they are supposed to have added their
fables simply did not exist. . . . Nobody remembered anything to the contrary
either. . . . There was no continuous transmission. Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and
others were cut off from the past: like the modern scholar, they could not get
behind their sources.... Finally, it has to be realized that the tradition as a
whole, not just parts of it as some have thought, is tendentious, and that that
tendentiousness arises from allegiance to Islam itself. The complete
unreliability of the Muslim tradition as far as dates are concerned has been
demonstrated by Lawrence Conrad. After close examination of the sources in an
effort to find the most likely birth date for Muhammad--traditionally `Am
al-fil, the Year of the Elephant, 570 C.E.--Conrad remarks that ["What
Historians have Deduced about the Historical Mohammed.

See also Barnes, T. D. "The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East II: Land
Use and Settlement Patterns, ed. Averil Cameron and G. R. D.; King [Papers of
the Second Workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Studies in Late
Antiquity and Early Islam 1], volume II (Princeton: The Darwin Press,
1994)" (1996-1997), IX: 191-199.; "The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near
East III: States, Resources and Armies, ed. Averil Cameron [Papers of the Third
Workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early
Islam 1], volume III (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1995)" (1996-1997), IX:
191-199.; "Albrecht Noth's The Early Arabic Historical tradition. A
Source-Critical Study, trans. Michael Bonner, in collaboration with Lawrence
I. Conrad [Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 3] (Princeton: The
Darwin Press, 1994)", (1996-1997), IX: 191-199.]:

"'Well
into the second century A.H. [A.H. is the muslim time
reckoning and means `Asahhus-siyar'.] scholarly opinion on the birth
date of the Prophet displayed a range of variance of eighty-five years. .. . .
. Muhammad, as Prophet and mouthpiece for the universal deity Allah, is an
invention of the ulama of the second and third centuries A.H".

Our own
estimation of the historical dislocation of the Prophet Mphammed would involve
far more than a mere “variance
of eighty-five years”. The fact is that we now have a
‘Mohammed’ who is a semi-legendary version of the original Prophet. Mohammed, a
composite figure, seems to have likenesses even to pre-Mosaïc patriarchs, and
to Jesus in the New Testament. Thus Mohammed, at Badr, successfully led a force
of 300+ men (the number varies from 300-318) against an enemy far superior in
number, as did Abraham (Genesis 14:14); and, like Jacob (Genesis 30, 31), he
used a ruse to get a wife (in Jacob's case, wives). And like Jesus, the
greatest of all God's prophets, Mohammed is said to have ascended into heaven
from Jerusalem.

(d)
Modern Myths about Moses

From the
above it can now be seen that it was not only the Greeks and Romans who have
been guilty of appropriation into their own folklore of famous figures of
Israel. Even the Moslems have done it and are still doing it. A modern-day
Islamic author from Cairo, Ahmed Osman, has - in line with psychiatrist Sigmund
Freud's view that Moses was actually an Egyptian, whose Yahwism was derived
from pharaoh Akhnaton's supposed monotheism [Out
of Egypt. The Roots of Christianity Revealed
(Century, 1998)] - identified all the major biblical Israelites, from
the patriarch Joseph to the Holy Family of Nazareth, as 18th dynasty Egyptian
characters. Thus Joseph = Yuya; Moses = Akhnaton; David = Thutmose III; Solomon
= Amenhotep III; Jesus = Tutankhamun; St. Joseph = Ay; Mary = Nefertiti.

This is mass
appropriation! Not to mention chronological madness!

I was
asked by Dr. Norman Simms of the University of Waikato (N.Z.) to write a
critique of Osman's book, a copy of which he had posted to me. This was a
rather easy task as the book leaves itself wide open to criticism. Anyway, the
result of Dr. Simms' request was my "Osman's 'Osmosis' of Moses"
article [The Glozel Newsletter, 5:1 (ns) 1999 (Hamilton, N.Z), pp. 1-17], in which
I argued that, because Osman is using the faulty textbook history of Egypt, he
is always obliged to give the chronological precedence to Egypt, when the
influence has actually come from Israel over to Egypt. [This article can now be
read at: http://www.academia.edu/3690035/Osmans_Osmosis_of_Moses]. The way that Egyptian
chronology is structured at present [Thanks largely
to E. Meyer's now approximately one century-old Ägyptische Chronologie, Philosophische und historische Abhandlungen
der Königlich preussischen Akad. der Wissenschaften, Berlin (Akad. der Wiss.,
1904).] could easily give rise to Osman's precedence in favour of Egypt
view (though this is no excuse for Osman's own chronological mish-mash). One
finds, for example, in pharaoh Hatshepsut's inscriptions such similarities to
king David's Psalms that it is only natural to think that she, the
woman-pharaoh - dated to the C15th BC, 500 years earlier than David - must have
influenced the great king of Israel. Or that pharaoh Akhnaton's Hymn to the
Sun, so like David's Psalm 104, had inspired David many centuries later. Only a
revision of Egyptian history brings forth the right perspective, and shows that
the Israelites actually had the chronological precedence in these as in many
other cases.

It gets
worse from a conventional point of view.

The
'doyen of Israeli archaeologists', Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University,
frequently interviewed by Beirut hostage victim John McCarthy on the
provocative TV program "It Ain't Necessarily So", is, together with
his colleagues, virtually writing ancient Israel right off the historical map,
along with all of its major biblical characters. On this, see our:

This horrible
mess is an inevitable consequence of the faulty Sothic chronology with which
these archaeologists seem to be mesmerized. With friends like
Finkelstein and co., why would Israel need any enemies!

The
Lawgiver Solon

Whilst the
great Lawgiver for the Hebrews was Moses, and for the Babylonians, Hammurabi,
and for the Moslems, Mohammed, the Lawgiver in Greek folklore was Solon
of Athens, the wisest of the wise, greatest of the Seven Sages.

Though
Solon is estimated to have lived in the C6th BC, his name and many of his
activities are so close to king Solomon's (supposedly 4 centuries earlier) that
we need once again to question whether the Greeks may have been involved in
appropriation. And, if so, how did this come about? It may in some cases simply
be a memory thing, just as according to Plato's Timaeus one of the very
aged Egyptian priests supposedly told Solon [Plato's Timaeus, trans. B. Jowett (The Liberal
Arts Press, NY, 1949), 6 (22) and /or Desmond Lee's translation, Penguin
Classics, p. 34]:

"O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes [Greeks] are
never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in
return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are
all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition,
nor any science which is hoary with age. …"

Perhaps
what the author of the Timaeus really needed to have put into the mouth
of the aged Egyptian priest was that the Greeks had largely forgotten who
Solomon was, and had created their own fictional character, "Solon",
from their vague recall of the great king Solomon who "excelled all the
kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom" (1 Kings 10:23). Solon
resembles Solomon especially in roughly the last decade of the latter's reign,
when Solomon, turning away from Yahwism, became fully involved with his
mercantile ventures, his fleet, travel, and building temples for his foreign
wives, especially in Egypt (10:26-29; 11:1-8).

Now, it
is to be expected that the pagan Greeks would remember this more 'rationalist'
aspect of Solomon (as Solon) rather than his wisdom-infused, philosophical,
earlier years when he was a devout Jew and servant of Yahweh (4:29-34). And
Jewish Solon apparently was! Edwin Yamauchi has studied the laws of Solon in
depth and found them to be quite Jewish in nature, most reminiscent of the laws
of Nehemiah (c. 450 BC) ["Two reformers compared: Solon of Athens
and Nehemiah of Jerusalem," Bible world. New York: KTAV, 1980. pp.
269-292].

That date
of 450 BC may perhaps be some sort of clue as to approximately when the Greeks
first began to create their fictional Solon.

Solomon
was, as I have argued in my "Solomon and Sheba" article ["Solomon and Sheba", SIS C and C Review,
1997:1, pp. 4-15], the most influential Senenmut of Egyptian history,
Hatshepsut's mentor; whilst Hatshepsut herself was the biblical Queen [of]
Sheba. This article can now be read at:

I have since learned of, and have embraced, E. Metzler's thesis in
"Conflict of Laws in the Israelite Dynasty of Egypt", Archives for
Mosaical Metrology and Mosaistics, Vol. II, No.1 (Jewish History Ring
Online, Undated), 1-26, that Solomon was also pharaoh Thutmose II; with king
David, his father, being Thutmose I. Hatshepsut was even more than that, as we
learn from Metzler, op. cit. She was Solomon's actual wife. (None of
this, however, cancels out Solomon’s also being Senenmut).

I have also identified Hatshepsut/Sheba as the biblical Abishag, who
comforted the aged David (I Kings 1-4), and the beautiful virgin daughter of
David, Tamar. See:

Professor
Henry Breasted had made a point relevant to my theme of Greek appropriation -
and in connection too with the Solomonic era (revised). Hatshepsut's
marvellous temple structure at Deir el-Bahri, he said, was "a sure witness
to the fact that the Egyptians had developed architectural styles for which the
Greeks later would be credited as the originators" [Breasted, H., A History of Egypt, 2nd ed., NY
(Scribner, 1924), p. 274].

One need
not necessarily perhaps always accuse the Greeks of a malicious corruption of
earlier traditions, but perhaps rather of a 'collective amnaesia', to use a
Velikovskian term; the sort of forgetfulness by the Greek nation as alluded to
in Plato's Timaeus.

There is
also to be considered that the Phoenicians and/or Jews had migrated to Greece.
In 1 Maccabees 12:21 [Areios king of the Spartans, to
Onias the high priest, greetings: "A document has been found stating that
the Spartans and the Jews are brothers; both nations descended from
Abraham." Areus, der
König zu Sparta, entbietet Onias, dem Hohenpriester, seinen Gruß. "Wir finden in
unsern alten Schriften, daß die von Sparta und die Juden Brüder sind, dieweil
beide Völker von Abraham herkommen." 1. Macc. 12:20, 21, The New American
Bible, 1970], for
instance, the Spartans claim to have been, like the Jews, descendants of
Abraham. By this late stage the earlier histories would already have been well
and truly corrupted. The Abrahamic emigrants would naturally have carried their
folklore - not to mention their architectural expertise - to the Greek
archipelago where it would inevitably have undergone local adaptation.

Solomon's
Influence

Now, if
Hammurabi were a contemporary of king Solomon's as Hickman has argued - was
in fact king Solomon as ruler of Babylon as we have argued - then, far from
Hammurabi's laws having influenced the Mosaïc Torah - Hammurabi would have been
he from whom the many kings of the earth who had imbibed the Solomonic wisdom
(including Solomon's Jewish laws) (I Kings 10:24), and had presumably emulated
them. That, I suggest, is how there arose the apparent similarity between the
Torah and Hammurabi's law code: the Mosaïc-influenced king Solomon transmitting
ancient Hebrew laws.

The
female pharaoh, Hatshepsut, was truly influenced by the Solomonic wisdom and
writings; and she was influenced also by the Psalms of Solomon's father, David.
Though conventionally dated to the C15th BC, half a millennium before Solomon,
Hatshepsut (in revised history) was actually Solomon's younger contemporary
(his very wife).

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What is the Australian Marian Academy of the Immaculate Conception (AMAIC)? The Australian Marian Academy [AMA], as it was initially known, was formed in the early 1980s largely by a group of academics and teachers devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, particularly under her title of Our Lady of the Rosary (at Fatima). In May of 1988 this was the description of the Australian Marian Academy written into our Constitution (p. 19):
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